When Does Convolutional Depth Matter? Nominal versus Effective Depth in VGG, ResNet, and GoogLeNet

Manfred M. Fischer and Joshua Pitts

No 2, Working Papers in Regional Science from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Abstract: Increasing convolutional depth has been central to advances in image recognition, yet deeper networks do not uniformly yield higher accuracy, stable optimization, or efficient computation. We present a controlled comparative study of three canonical convolutional neural network architectures — VGG, ResNet, and GoogLeNet — to isolate how depth influences classification performance, convergence behavior, and computational efficiency. By standardizing training protocols and explicitly distinguishing between nominal and effective depth, we show that the benefits of depth depend critically on architectural mechanisms that constrain its effective manifestation during training rather than on nominal depth alone. Although plain deep networks exhibit early accuracy saturation and optimization instability, residual and inception-based architectures consistently translate additional depth into improved accuracy at lower effective depth and favorable accuracy–compute trade-offs. These findings demonstrate that effective depth, not nominal depth, is the operative quantity governing depth’s role as a productive scaling dimension in convolutional networks.

Date: 2026
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